2of2Greg Barrett, whose name is also Greg Gay, speaks at a Katy ISD board public forum on March 19, 2018Photo: Katy ISD video

If the Katy school board didn’t have a problem with bullying before, it has one now.

This time, the unprovoked aggression isn’t stemming from some decades-old alleged incident in which Katy Superintendent Lance Hindt is accused of shoving the head of a middle school classmate into a urinal.

No, this time it’s a vote planned for Thursday in which the Katy district’s board of trustees will weigh whether to hire “special outside counsel” to pursue a defamation lawsuit in support of the superintendent, along with other district officials and staff.

As the Chronicle’s Mike Glenn has reported, the agenda item doesn’t state the reason for the district’s decision to contemplate legal action, and the district hasn’t said at whom such action would be aimed.

But the intent seems clear: powerful district leaders armed with taxpayer dollars, trying to threaten and intimidate the little guys who have dared criticize the popular, engaging superintendent over the past several weeks. And in the process, dissuading any others from coming forward.

It’s the latest in a series of poor decisions that have marred the handling of bullying allegations that have gained international attention over the past two months.

It all started when Katy businessman Greg Gay confronted Hindt at a school board meeting in March, accusing the superintendent of joining the group of boys who bullied Gay about his last name. Gay said that after the attack in a boy’s restroom in which he says his head was shoved in a urinal, he went home and contemplated suicide.

Hindt, who sat alongside board members during Gay’s testimonial, the video of which has gone viral on the Internet, was criticized for appearing to smile or laugh off Gay’s allegation. Hindt later described his reaction as shock.

But his response to subsequent events wasn’t any better. If the allegation was true, and Hindt had owned up to it, but presented himself as a changed man who has learned from his mistakes, the narrative would have been completely different. Hindt may have been hailed as the perfect person to address bullying problems in the district.

Instead, Hindt adamantly denied any role in bullying Gay. Later, he seemed to hint at some wrongdoing, saying he was not a perfect person, and that long before a religious awakening in the 1990s, “I was young and dumb, and I did dumb things.”

But he has never apologized to Gay - only to Katy ISD for the negative attention the story has brought. He hasn’t given Gay’s allegation the attention it deserves, despite another former classmate coming forward to verify Gay’s account, and yet another former classmate, now a circuit court judge in Alabama, who alleged that Hindt was a “vicious bully” when they both attended Taylor High School, where Hindt played varsity football.

A couple of weeks ago, Hindt seemed to make his first upstanding gesture in the ordeal. He claimed to reporters following a "Support Lance" rally outside district headquarters that he’d like to have a one-on-one meeting with Gay, saying, “I just hope at some point we can sit down - and not in a big, public forum.”

Sounded like a good idea. But it never happened.

“I think he said that for the media,” Gay told me Tuesday, explaining that he hadn’t heard anything from Hindt about a sit-down.

He’d only heard, from news reports, about a potential lawsuit - which he finds absurd.

And he’s not alone. The bar for a public official to prove defamation is high, and the allegations aired so far don’t involve Hindt’s actions as Katy superintendent.

“They’re fixing to waste taxpayer’s money,” says Gay, who doesn’t believe he’s done anything to draw a defamation claim. “These people have lost their minds.”

Another potential target of the district could be Sean Dolan, a Katy businessman and parent who has gone public with his son’s account of being bullied in Katy ISD. Dolan also runs a blog critical of Hindt and other district officials. Most recently, Dolan suggested Hindt had lifted certain lines of his doctoral thesis from another scholarly paper; a district spokesperson told Fox 26 the claim had no merit.

“It’s definitely a scare tactic of a bully,” Dolan said about the district’s threat of hiring special counsel. “Even the insinuation of a defamation lawsuit, just to even say that, is a form of bullying.”

He said he’s not worried about a lawsuit, but is bothered by the precedent it could set.

“If people exercise their freedom of speech, they’ll be punished for it,” he said.

Dolan said his motivation isn’t personal; it is to spur the district to do more about bullying in Katy schools. Like Gay, he says he has gotten little meaningful response from the district.

He said he regularly hears from parents whose children are enduring the same kind of bullying his son went through. He doesn’t understand why the school board seems more motivated to protect the superintendent than the children.

“I would shake his hand tomorrow,” Dolan said of Hindt. “I just want the problems resolved and I don’t know how to get them heard, much less resolved.”

A defamation lawsuit will resolve nothing. It will only waste taxpayer money on hefty attorney fees in a legal battle that has slim chance of prevailing.

Surely, Katy school trustees can find a better use for public funds. And surely, they can set a better example for students.

Bullying — whether by children or by full-grown elected officials — is never the answer.

Lisa Falkenberg is the Chronicle’s vice president/editor of opinion. A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist with more than 20 years’ experience, Falkenberg leads the editorial board and the paper’s opinion and outlook sections, including letters, op-eds and Gray Matters.

Falkenberg wrote a metro column at the Chronicle for more than a decade that explored a range of topics, including education, criminal justice and state, local and national politics. In 2015, Falkenberg was awarded the Pulitzer for commentary, as well as the American Society of News Editors’ Mike Royko Award for Commentary/Column Writing for a series that exposed a wrongful conviction in a death case and led Texas lawmakers to reform the grand jury system. She was a Pulitzer finalist in 2014.

Raised in Seguin, Texas, Falkenberg is the daughter of a truck driver and a homemaker, and the first in her family to go to college. She earned a journalism degree from the University of Texas at Austin in 2000. She started her career at The Associated Press, working in the Austin and Dallas bureaus. In 2004, Falkenberg was named Texas AP Writer of the Year.

She joined the Chronicle in 2007 as a roving state correspondent based in Austin.

Falkenberg has mentored journalism students through the Chronicle’s high school journalism program and volunteered with the News Literacy Project. She is a fellow with the British-American Project and has completed a fellowship at Loyola’s Journalist Law School in Los Angeles.